WASHINGTON – More than 1 million customers in the US as far west as New Mexico were without electricity and over 10,000 flights were cancelled on Jan 25 during a

monster winter storm that paralysed

 eastern and southern states with heavy snow and ice.

As snow, sleet, freezing rain and dangerously frigid temperatures swept into the eastern two-thirds of the nation on Jan 25, the number of power outages continued to rise. As of 2.16pm EST on Jan 25 (3.16am on Jan 26, Singapore time), more than 1 million US customers were without electricity, according to PowerOutage.us, with at least 330,000 in Tennessee and over 100,000 each in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Other states affected included Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, West Virginia and Alabama.

More than 10,800 US flights

scheduled for Jan 25 were cancelled

, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. Over 4,000 flights were cancelled on Jan 24.

Washington DC’s Ronald Reagan National Airport said airlines had cancelled all flights at the airport on Jan 25. FlightAware data indicated that more than 80 per cent of Jan 25 flights were cancelled for several airports in large metropolitan regions, including New York, Philadelphia and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Delta Air Lines on Jan 25 said that it intended to operate on a reduced schedule “subject to real-time frozen precipitation and afternoon storm conditions.”The airline had adjusted its schedule on Jan 24, with additional cancellations in the morning for Atlanta and along the East Coast, including in Boston and New York City, and said it would move experts from cold-weather hubs to support de-icing and baggage teams at several southern airports.

The National Weather Service’s latest forecast for Jan 25 through Jan 26 morning calls for heavy snow from the Ohio Valley to the North-east, including up to 46cm in New England. Much of the South-east and parts of the Mid-Atlantic are expected to get rain and freezing rain.

Forecasters predicted “bitterly cold temperatures and dangerously cold wind chills” from the southern plains to the Northeast in the wake of the storm, bringing “prolonged hazardous travel and infrastructure impacts.”

Federal, state governments declare emergencies

Calling the storms “historic,” President Donald Trump on Jan 24 approved federal emergency disaster declarations in South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana, and West Virginia.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia declared weather emergencies on Jan 24, the Department of Homeland Security said.

Power lines could be particularly vulnerable because of the potential for ice, officials said.

“The situation with this storm is pretty unique, just because it’s going to stay cold for a period of time,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on the Fox News Sunday Briefing programme. “This ice that has fallen will keep those lines heavy, even if they haven’t gone down immediately.”

The Department of Energy on Jan 24 issued an emergency order authorising the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to deploy backup generation resources at data centres and other major facilities, aiming to limit blackouts in the state.

On Jan 25, the DOE issued an emergency order to authorise grid operator PJM Interconnection to run “specified resources” in the mid-Atlantic region, regardless of limits due to state laws or environmental permits. US electric grid operators on Jan 24 stepped up precautions to avoid rotating blackouts.

Dominion Energy, whose Virginia operations include the largest collection of data centres in the world, said if its ice forecast held, the winter event could be among the largest to affect the company. REUTERS